Rich’s p16 came in at 11th place in the 2016 Pattern of the Year awards. First place was never even a remote possibility, not in a year that produced the Caterloopillar and the Copperhead. (I actually thought the latter would win handily, but I guess that’s just my relative lack of interest in engineered spaceships showing.)

A week or so ago, a better recipe was found for the last still life on Mark Niemiec's list of expensive 14-bit syntheses. Now all 14-bit still lifes can be constructed with less than 14 gliders -- less than 1 glider per bit, as the old saying goes.

UPDATE: The next challenge along these lines was to similarly reduce 15-bit still life costs to below 1 glider per bit. The process started later in the same forum thread, and was completed on November 19, 2016, with the following 14-glider synthesis:

UPDATE 2: The next project involved a similar reduction for 16-bit still life recipes. The official project kickoff was on December 16, 2016, when 443 of the 3,286 16-bit still lifes had no synthesis in less than 16 gliders in Chris Cain's database. It concluded successfully on May 24, 2017.

That lame explanation seems even more lame when you consider this: The non totalistic rule B37c/S23 (meaning birth occurs if there are 3 live neighbors, or if there are 7 live neighbors with the dead neighbor in the corner of the neighborhood) is explosive, but B37e/S23 (birth occurs if there are 3 live neighbors, or if there are 7 live neighbors with the dead neighbor on the edge of the neighborhood) isn’t.

Here’s an even more perplexing (to me, at least) instance of different CA behavior under similar-but-different rules. Consider this 32 x 32 soup: B36/S23 is a Life-like rule sometimes called HighLife. Many objects behave the same way as in Life; in particular, blocks, loaves, boats, and beehives are still lifes; blinkers are p2 oscillators; gliders are c/4 diagonal spaceships. So after 378 generations in B36/S23 when that soup looks like this, it’s stabilized: B38/S23 has no nickname I know of. Under that rule, the same soup stabilizes in 483 generations: And in B37/S23… here’s what it evolves to after 10,000 generations:Population 17,298 and growing, presumably forever.

Fairly typical. I’ve seen some soups take several thousand generations to stabilize in B38/S23, and I’ve seen a few — very few — stabilize in B37/S23. But most soups stabilize in 1000 generations or so in B36/S23 and B38/S23… and almost all soups explode in B37/S23.

It surprises me how hard it can be to guess what kind of behavior a given CA rule will produce. There are some things that are fairly obvious. For instance, under a rule that doesn’t include births with fewer than 4 live neighbors, no pattern will never expand past its bounding box. (Any empty cell outside the bounding box will have no more than 3 live neighbors, so no births will occur there.)

But beyond a few observations like that, it’s hard to predict. At least for me.

Consider the rule B34/S456, for a semi random example. Start with a 32 by 32 soup at 50% density: Then let it run for 1000 generations. It expands to a blob 208 by 208 in size, population 21,132:But change the B34/S456 rule to B3/S456 or B4/S456 — removing one number or the other from the birth rule — and either way, the same initial configuration dies.

It goes left to right (right to left in the original soup) at speed 36c/72.

Again, the way this comes about is through development of a small seed. In this case at generation 83 you get a couple of these objectswhich in four generations recur, inverted, but with some debris.By itself, this seed becomes a 36c/72 puffer.But two of them, mirror images at just the right separation, have their smoke trails interact in such a way as to extinguish them, and the result is a spaceship. If you start with this pair

Hot on the heels of Rich’s p16, here’s a period 18 oscillator, once again found using apgsearch. It even bears a family resemblance to the p16: D2_+1 symmetry and shuttle behavior. But… it doesn’t work in Life (B3/S23). It works in B357/S23.

Tim Coe has found a symmetrical spaceship with a new speed, 3c/7 (left, below) after a series of searches that took a total of "one or two months". At 29 cells wide, it is the minimum width odd symmetric spaceship -- an exhaustive width 27 search was run some time ago by Paul Tooke. The author seems to have officially chosen a name of "Spaghetti Monster" for the new 3c/7 spaceship.

Matthias Merzenich has pointed out that two of these spaceships can support a known 3c/7 wave (right, below).